HackerLoop is a group of Berlin and Paris based engineers who dedicate their time to creating and building awesome projects. They describe themselves saying: “Hackerloop is keen on fun, silly, or outright stupid projects, as long as it brings fun and smiles.”
They have created a prosthetic nerf gun that can fire when the wearer contracts their forearm muscles. The Hackerloop engineers got this idea when their colleague Nicolas Huchet lost his hand a couple of years ago and was at a huge disadvantage in Nerf warfare.
They wanted to make the battle a fair competition for everyone so they set their minds to thinking how they could build their colleague a gun that did not require a trigger. This gave rise to the prosthetic nerf gun. The talented team was able to create the weapon in just two days using basic equipment that is available online.
The gun makes use of electromyography (EMG) for the firing mechanism. With EMG, you can electrical activity of muscle tissue as a signal. When Huchet contracts his forearm, the muscles activity is sent through an Arduino computer which triggers the gun to fire.
“Electromyography is a great way to make the body communicate with hardware. We used it to detect electrical impulses and translated them into instructions for our gun. You could think of a thousand other uses. You could think it’s not the first problem to solve for people with disabilities, but in fact being able to have fun with your friends with these wonderful toys is also a real game changer”, the Hackerloop team says.
You can check out the cool prosthetic nerf gun in the video below:
